Legal AI Doc Review Grows Again – Lexalytics Joins the Fray

Boston-based text analytics company, Lexalytics, has announced ‘its first foray into the document data extraction market’, adding another vendor to the legal AI doc review space.

The company, which despite the name, is not focused just on law and has for 15 years worked in many different sectors (see some of its clients in the pic above) is now hoping to focus on ‘corporate documents’, which seems to suggest getting into the world of legal document review also.

Their USP, they say, is that they have a combined offering that can handle structured and unstructured data at the same time (i.e. numbers in tables and text in a normal document format). However, from what Artificial Lawyer has seen from many demos over the last couple of years there are a lot of legal AI companies that can already do this.

That said, the more the merrier. With around 25 legal AI doc review companies listed in the AL 100 already, we may as well have a few more. It’s a big market out there. Although how much stomach law firms have now to try out new systems is a key question when there are so many already to choose from.

To make its USP stronger Lexalytics says it can go beyond just extraction and categorisation of data. ‘Lexalytics’ understanding of the underlying text through AI-based NLP allows it to … do things such as create an intelligent recommendation system,’ they explain, that will respond to the data extracted to help speed up decision-making.

It can also handle documents from ‘virtually any format, including PDF, TXT, XML, HTML and Word, and then export it into standard ERP systems and Excel’.

Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics, commented: ‘Lexalytics has been a leader in extracting insights from unstructured data for more than 15 years. Lexalytics Data Extraction Services represents the first time we’ve brought this capability to the document data extraction market, and we’re excited to help companies go beyond what the current technology allows.’

It may not be a legal specialist, but it has huge experience in data extraction and works with many global companies and across more than 20 languages, although this can sometimes be focused on matters such as ‘social media monitoring, reputation management and voice of the customer programmes’.

Is this better than any of the other systems out there? Does its long experience of issues such as sentiment analysis have some special use cases for law firms….perhaps for their BD and marketing teams….?

There could certainly be a use case for extraction and analysis tech that pored over market data to gather useful insights and intelligence, and that could even include Twitter feeds of potential clients. We’ll soon see.